14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft announced the debut of a collection of initiatives designed to bridge the gap between online identity management services. According to the Redmond Company, the key aspect of building a universal web identity metasystem is interoperability.
"Our customers expect us to enable interoperability between Microsoft-based solutions, as well as across other platforms and technologies. For this reason, we take a very pragmatic, customer-centric view of interoperability," said Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft. "Addressing the effective exchange of identity information is a perfect example of how we look at interoperability holistically in order to meet a critical customer need."
Microsoft stated that it has set out to deliver interoperability by design. As a consequence, the measures announced by the company will impact directly the three elements situated, in Microsoft's perspective, at the core of the identity metasystem. Microsoft's efforts to improve interoperability will result in benefits for the people involved in the web identity metasystem, for the websites or services requiring proof of identity and for the identity providers.
One of the initiatives debuted by the Redmond Company involves four open source projects designed to streamline the implementation and support of information cards by Web developers. Microsoft has underlined the fact that information card support is the main mechanism of the identity metasystem.
"The projects will implement software for specifying the Web site's security policy and accepting information cards in Java for Sun Java System Web Servers or Apache Tomcat or IBM's WebSphere Application Server, Ruby on Rails, and PHP for the Apache Web server. An additional project will implement a C Library that may be used generically for any Web site or service. These implementations will complement the existing ability to support information cards on the Microsoft Windows platform using the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment," Microsoft explained.
The Redmond Company has also offered the Identity Selector Interoperability Profile under the OSP. This means that the Microsoft identity metasystem for client computers independent of platform can be used disregarding licenses and intellectual property rights.